By Susan Carlile and Karenza Sutton-Bennett
The below assignments can be completed as in-class assignments (individual or groups) and/or as take-home assignments. Each assignment invites students to engage with the magazine and to use critical reading skills to analyze the text in (hopefully) fun and engaging ways.
1) The Lady’s Museum Scavenger Hunt: Students scan the entire Lady’s Museum to find a document about (or reference to): the solar system, scented paste, the biography of a woman, reference to the supernatural, an animal, spices of any kind, a translation from another language, a poem, or a philosophical discussion, and report what they learn about this period, readers, and the function of magazines in the eighteenth-century.[1]
2) Eighteenth-Century Magazine Comparison: If an instructor has access to British Newspapers 1600-1950, British Periodicals, Collections I & II, or Eighteenth Century Journals: A Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals, c1685-1815 (which contains the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818), or Eighteenth-Century Collections Online students can compare layout, content, and audience.[2]
3) Letter to the Trifler: write from the viewpoint of a reader of the Lady’s Museum. Students report what they learn about the motivations, needs, and values of the Lady’s Museum, its editor, and its readers; and cite evidence in the magazine as support. [student sample]
4) Visualizing Literature Project: students will practice the skill of close textual reading by analyzing how 1 of the 11 images from the Lady’s Museum enhances the corresponding article. The student will create an infographic that demonstrates how the literary work is represented by the image.
5) Choose an assigned extract and read the entire installment: Write a reflection explaining what students miss by only reading the extract and make a justification for which sections should be added or removed from the reader.
6) Have students pick an installment of “The History of Harriot and Sophia”: Compare it with the relevant chapter in Sophia. Are their significant or minor changes? How do the changes change the intent of the chapter and/or the novel as a whole?
[1] Susan adapted this idea from Manushag Powell.
[2] ECCO is freely accessible to all American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies members. Portions of the Female Spectator are available in open access: https://s.wayne.edu/warriorwomen/haywood-edition/. Additionally, more eighteenth-century open access texts: https://anthologydev.lib.virginia.edu/index.html